What is the main conflict in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway?

The social concerns and themes of these Spanish Civil War stories turn on the complex political issues brought into focus by that conflict: questions of left and right, Communism and Fascism, and every shade and nuance of political and social engagement or disengagement. As a group, these stories represent Hemingway's effort to clarify for himself his own political attitudes toward the Spanish Civil War, as a prelude to the writing of his masterpiece about that conflict, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Social and political concerns are the strong point of these stories,
characterization the weakest point. The first story, "The Denunciation" (1938) deals with the question of the writer and narrator of the tale as a foreign observer of a war, and the attendant moral and aesthetic involvement and responsibility of such a writer. There are troublesome currents in this story, and some critics feel that Hemingway is engaged here in selfdenunciation; that he is confessing his own guilt over his attacks on fellow writer and former close friend, John Dos Passos; or, more generally, confessing his personal bad faith in certain aspects of his involvement with the Spanish situation. Of course, other critics argue that the writer-narrator is not to be confused with Ernest Hemingway. In this instance, that argument does not ring true, for it seems that there is much that is deeply personal in this story, as in others in this series.